Spectrum of the Seas – Part 3 – The Ocean View Balcony Stateroom

We actually made our decision to opt for a June school holiday cruise fairly late relative to the sailing date: by the time we were ready to make a reservation, many of the staterooms were no longer available. To be fair though, even when we’ve returned home, I still have no idea what was the final occupancy was on our cruise. Thinking back, I doubt the ship sailed at full occupancy. Our stateroom was on deck 9, but we only occasionally ran into other guests on the floor, which led me to speculate that the cruise might had been maybe just half-full. That does give me the shivers though: judging from our experience at Windjammer, and also the size of the audience at several live performance events, I can’t imagine how much more crowded the experience would had been if the ship had sailed at full passenger capacity!

Or possibly, I am just completely wrong about the actual occupancy during our actual sailing: just that most guests were hiding in their staterooms most of the time.

In any case, our stateroom was 9606 – an (Unobstructed) Ocean View Balcony type of room. Our room could sleep up to 4 guests – some staterooms of this type can sleep just three – and the cost of our 5D4N cruise was SGD3552.64. I’ll do a cost analysis of the trip in my final post in this series. In the mean time, here are my notes of the stateroom.

There was an envelope containing guest key cards (the “Sea Pass”) mounted at the door signage – one for each registered guest in the room. Each card can be used to unlock the room door, and also contains key information printed onto it, including our table number in Main Dining (I’d registered our table preference before sailing). The cards are used to register admission into selected activity types, so do carry these with you. For kids, a further wrist band is also provided for identification purposes, e.g. in case of evacuations.

There’s also a digital key feature in the RC app in case you don’t want to use the key card to enter your stateroom. It didn’t seem to work very well though – often taking 3-4 seconds for the dock lock to recognize the smartphone. I tried it out once, then discarded the idea in preference of using the key card to unlock the room door.

Remember the checked-in luggage I mentioned in the first post of this series? Well, our luggage wasn’t already in the room when we were able to access it from 1:30PM onwards: but came a few hours later, and the two pieces we had came separately too. So, Pro tip: the key things you immediately need in the room, e.g. phone chargers, wet-wipes, should be in your handheld carry-on bags. Our two checked-in luggage bags were also not brought directly into the room but left outside it – and the luggage attendants did not notify any room occupants either. So, remember to secure your checked-in luggage as needed, and do a check outside your stateroom on Day 1 every now and then if your luggage is waiting outside the room.

Stateroom 9606 has a room area of 185 square feet, and a balcony of 55 square feet. Just for comparison sake, most deluxe or superior rooms of four star or better hotels would be around 250 square feet or more. So, the room is a little smaller than your typical hotel room, albeit even more compact when one considers that there were four occupants in our room.

Our stateroom has a queen-sized bed – actually two double beds joined together, but you can’t feel the middle gap, thankfully – and a sofa that can be folded out to a double bed that can sleep two more. The sofa bed could comfortably sleep Hannah and Peter, and it can probably fit adults too – just that there won’t be too much space for an adult to roll about. Our main bed also stands on feet, so we could easily fit our 26″ sized luggage underneath the main bed frame.

The sofa bed once folded out means there’s just a tiny space for you to walk past it to get to the balcony. For those of us who’re a bit of a klutz when navigating tight spaces (e.g. like me), thread carefully when walking through this narrow passage: the edges of the sofa bed frame are curved, but I scrapped my knee against the sofa bed frame almost every day when I was trying to get to our stateroom balcony.

Do note too: when you first get access to the room, the sofa bed will not be laid out yet with pillows, quilts and bed sheets. Your room attendant would do so at your request and requirements on the first night. The challenge is that once it’s laid out, your usable free area in the room gets severely limited. You could, in theory, fold the sofa bed back into the sofa configuration if free roaming space in the room is important to you, but folding the sofa bed back to its original sofa configuration honestly looked like more trouble than it was worth, so we never attempted it.

All of us slept very well across all nights – fortunately. This isn’t something we take for granted, so credit to our stateroom on this ship.

The room comes with a small tray of hot beverage types. We ended up not touching these, since coffee and a variety of teas were readily available at the restaurants during most normal day hours and Sorrento in the late nights. There was also a kettle for us to boil water (we were told by Guest Services that water from the tap should be boiled… just to be safe) – a small cooler unit to keep your drinks cool, a small safety deposit box that is large enough only for small documents, passports, and small mobile devices i.e. not laptops or DSLRs. There’s a wall-mounted flat screen FHD TV that provides cruise, location, programme, account and ship information, in addition to a small range of entertainment content (news, documentaries, films) with varying age suitability levels.

The balcony had two deck chairs and accompanying leg rests. The balcony’s half-height glass barrier is also high enough to discourage young kids from climbing onto it. Peter even at nine years old isn’t tall – and it would had taken a lot of effort for him to climb over the glass barrier, even with the aid of those leg rests. Nonetheless, we told him of our unbreakable ground-rule before we boarded: that he was to ask us for permission if he wanted to go to the balcony, and the curtains must be drawn for us to keep an eye on him while in the room.

There were no issues with the room’s air-conditioning too. The room might get a little heated up during the day time and depending on the sun’s facing into the room, but the room curtains will help with that. The room also got a little cold in the night too, but not to the point where our kids were freezing.

There were two wardrobes in our rooms, one of which had additional shelves. Both wardrobes had a large number of clothes hangers (at least 20 is my guess) – way more than we needed.

Onto the bathroom: the bathroom stall is just about big enough for an adult. There was just a standard shower head in the stall, and also a shampoo-body shower foam dispenser mounted on the wall. Pro tip: bring along your own toiletries. The stateroom does not supply toothbrushes, so you’d need to bring your own too.

There were no room slippers or bathrobes: or at least, none that we could find.

As for room power points: I found three power sockets of the US standard 110 volts AC type in the stateroom: two where the small writing desk is, and another on one side of the main bed. There are no separate on-off power switches for these power points.

I seriously dislike these US type power sockets, being so used to the UK power socket types that we use in Singapore: the UK plugs lock into power sockets easily and do not fall off. More seriously was that when plugged into the room power sockets, two of my USB-C hub charging devices could not supply the minimum wattage necessary to charge more than one device at a time. I have no problem at home. I wonder if our stateroom had some sort of upper power draw limit per socket. Nonetheless, it took some trial and error to figure out the best charger configuration to charge the Lenovo Yoga 13 Pro laptop that I’d brought along for this trip. So, if you can and if you’re bringing along multiple mobile devices – e.g. we had two Android smartphones, two iPads, two cameras, and the Yoga 13 Pro – bring along multiple USB charging hubs and see which one works best.

Thankfully, our room also has two USB charging ports that accepts cables with USB type A plugs. I don’t think these are of the quick-charge standards, but it will still charge your mobile devices (excepting laptops), just slowly.

All in all, we were still happy with the stateroom. Sleep quality was great, the room was clean and offered plenty of storage spaces, and our fear of not having spaces for our checked-in luggage bags was eventually unfounded. The bits that didn’t work included the room power supply for devices, and that once the sofa bed gets laid out, usable space in the room gets real limited. I recall that the additional costs of better rooms – e.g. the suites – is quite high, so I reckon that the Ocean View Balcony Staterooms like ours would be the go to choice for many guests. So, you’d want to plan accordingly.

Next post – on dining!